New York Trial Will Explore the Secret World of Mercenary Soldiers

Over the course of the next few weeks, a jury in New York will hear the story of a South African crime lord who dealt in guns and gold and the team of former military men he hired to do his dirty work.

The panel may be told about a smuggling ship that sank one day in the waters off Manila or of plans to stage a rebellion in the Seychelles. There is likely to be testimony about safe houses in Africa, illegal pain pills trafficked out of Mexico and the murder of a Filipino woman who was shot in the face and then dumped from a van.

Three men go on trial this week on charges connected to the murder, and the evidence is expected to tell a tale of international intrigue — one that resembles a James Bond movie, as one of the defendants was caught saying on a government recording.

With its exotic locations and cast of violent characters, the trial, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, will also provide the jurors with a privileged glimpse of a rarely seen milieu: the covert world of mercenary soldiers.

Joseph Hunter, 52, a former United States Army sergeant with Special Forces training, stands at the center of the trial, accused of planning the murder of the Filipino woman, Catherine Lee, while serving as the chief of security for a globe-trotting criminal named Paul Le Roux.

The other two defendants, Adam Samia, a former Army sniper, and Carl D. Stillwell, a onetime weapons trainer, are accused of carrying out the murder on Mr. Hunter’s orders. All three have pleaded not guilty and deny the charges. The trial began on Monday with jury selection.

Mr. Le Roux oversaw smuggling rings on four continents, prosecutors say, and is expected to emerge from the shadows for the first time to testify against his former henchmen.

For more than 20 years, Mr. Le Roux was an enterprising kingpin with illicit businesses that included running weapons in the Philippines, smuggling opioids from Mexico to Texas and cultivating hallucinogenic plants at a secret compound in Somalia, authorities said.

All of that ended in late 2012 when Mr. Le Roux, now in his 40s, was arrested in Liberia by the Drug Enforcement Administration and began to cooperate with the American authorities. In one of his first clandestine jobs, he helped the government arrange a sting operation in Phuket, Thailand, in 2013 that led to the arrests of Mr. Hunter and a group of other men, who were charged with planning to assassinate a D.E.A. agent and one of his informants.

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Joseph Hunter, an American mercenary, was led by Thai police officers after his arrest in 2013. He goes on trial this week in Manhattan on federal charges he orchestrated the murder of a Filipino real-estate agent for a South African crime boss.CreditSakchai Lalit/Associated Press

Because the case in Thailand included allegations that Mr. Hunter and his partners had conspired to ship cocaine into New York, it was prosecuted by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. Manhattan prosecutors are handling the current case as well, saying it emerged from the same investigation.

On the witness stand, Mr. Le Roux is expected to explain how in 2008 two of his employees, David Smith and John O’Donoghue, set up a company called Echelon Associates, which hired former soldiers to provide security on his gold-buying trips to Africa and to oversee his illegal shipments of military weapons, according to court papers.

He is also likely to recount how Mr. Smith was murdered in 2010 (after he was caught stealing gold) and how Mr. Hunter — promoted to replace him — went on to hire Mr. Samia and Mr. Stillwell in the plot to kill Ms. Lee, according to court papers.

Some of the evidence corroborating Mr. Le Roux’s account came from secret video recordings made in a villa in Phuket where Mr. Hunter was living at the time of his arrest. In those recordings, Mr. Hunter can be heard telling the men he recruited in the plot against the D.E.A. agent that he had killed other people for Mr. Le Roux in the past — among them, a Filipino real-estate agent.

Mr. Hunter’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, tried unsuccessfully to have the recordings thrown out, arguing they were obtained illegally and were not proof of a crime.

While the government has never detailed a specific motive for Ms. Lee’s murder, it has provided evidence that Mr. Hunter helped get Mr. Samia, 43, and Mr. Stillwell, 50, firearms and silencers, and later paid them $35,000 each for what court papers say he called an act of “ninja work.”

Prosecutors say the two men sent the payments back to their loved ones in North Carolina in illegal “structured transfers” intended to evade detection. They have also said that Mr. Stillwell kept a photo on his cellphone of “a wounded human head” taken around the time Ms. Lee was killed.

When Mr. Samia was arrested in North Carolina in 2013, he told two agents from the D.E.A. that he had worked with Mr. Hunter in Africa, mostly providing protection to a business owner who bought gold on the continent and shipped it to Hong Kong and Dubai, court papers say. Mr. Samia acknowledged that he had also traveled to the Philippines on Mr. Hunter’s orders, but only, he said, to perform “security work and advance work,” according to the court papers.

In his own interview with the D.E.A., however, Mr. Stillwell admitted that he and Mr. Samia had met Ms. Lee in the Philippines under the guise of asking her to take them on a tour of real-estate properties in the countryside. He said he was driving the van when Mr. Samia abruptly shot the woman in the face. According to court papers, Mr. Samia later disposed of her body, leaving it lying on a pile of garbage, Mr. Stillwell told the agents.